zvol vs plain file for VMs

[Ashish SHUKLA]

On Mon, 22 Dec 2014 12:34:07 +0100, Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass at gmx.com> said:


| On 12/20/14 06:41, Ashish SHUKLA wrote:
|| On Fri, 19 Dec 2014 19:59:32 +0100, Nikos Vassiliadis <nvass at gmx.com> said:
|| | Hi,
|| 
|| | I have to convert a mail server to a VM and I don't know what kind of
|| | storage to use, a plain file or a zvol?
|| 
|| | Are there any pros in using ZVOLs instead of plain files?
|| 
|| | Thanks, Nikos
|| 
|| I don't use FreeBSD for VMs, but theoretically plain file will have filesystem
|| overhead which ZVOL won't.
|| 
|| HTH
|| 

| Hi,

| Thank you for your reply Ashish!

| When you say overhead, you mean overhead on disk or in RAM? could you
| explain a bit more?

Overhead as in, read/writes to file will go through filesystem driver to block
devices, which involves traversing filesystem structures, compared to ZVOL
which is likely to be contiguous and is exposed as a block device.

HTH
-- 
Ashish SHUKLA      | GPG: F682 CDCC 39DC 0FEA E116  20B6 C746 CFA9 E74F A4B0
Sent from my Emacs
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